Dravidian

node · earth · South Asia, principally southern India, with Brahui in Balochistan

A family of some dozens of languages concentrated in southern India, with Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam as its major literary members and Tamil holding one of the oldest continuous literary traditions of any living language. Two features make it disproportionately important to this Journey. First, it is a well-demonstrated family with a solid reconstruction, standing beside Indo-Aryan in the same subcontinent, which allows contact and inheritance to be told apart: the retroflex consonants and certain syntactic patterns shared across the South Asian linguistic area are widely attributed to Dravidian influence on incoming Indo-Aryan rather than to common descent, and Dravidian loanwords have been argued for even in the oldest Vedic texts. Second, its geography is discontinuous. Brahui is spoken far to the northwest, in Balochistan, hundreds of kilometres from the main body of the family — a distribution read by some as a relic of a formerly wider Dravidian range and by others as the result of a later migration. Proposals that the Indus Valley civilisation spoke a Dravidian language remain unproven, since its script is undeciphered.